Mitt's media blowback

Mitt Romney’s vulnerabilities as a candidate are well known, yet a seemingly new one surfaced last week: his unusual brittleness in the face of media questions.

With one prickly interview with Fox’s Bret Baier on Tuesday — in which the candidate appeared uncomfortable and even angry fielding basic questions about his record — the former Massachusetts governor set off a round of speculation about his ability to operate outside hermetically sealed campaign events, reminding his rivals and the media of the extreme lengths to which he has gone to evade the national press.

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On a Fox panel that night, Juan Williams called the interview “disastrous,” Jonah Goldberg said Romney appeared “uncomfortable” and Baier said people thought Romney seemed “irritated and tense” — sentiments that were echoed across the other networks that night and in print the next morning.

For a candidate who has been in the national spotlight as long as Romney, his discomfort with Baier was telling. And it reflected a deliberate and long-standing strategy of dodging tough questions and questioners. Romney is inaccessible even by the tightly scripted standards of the contemporary campaign bubble: Not only is the candidate kept at arm’s length from reporters, the campaign typically responds to the news media only when it feels it is in its interest. Inconvenient questions are met with silence.

“Romney’s team made the calculation that politicians try to make from time to time, that you can avoid the mainstream media,” Joe Klein, who recently profiled Romney for Time magazine and was not granted an interview, told POLITICO. “In certain circumstances, you can shoot over or under us, but to try to avoid us completely is foolish because the pressure is going to build.”

“This is a very poor media operation,” one political director for a leading cable news network complained to POLITICO. “The lack of response to any media request is very frustrating. At least you should acknowledge calls and emails — in their case, it’s like a black hole.”

On Fox, his party’s network of choice, Romney has put in fewer than 20 appearances in the past six months — far fewer than most other candidates, including Newt Gingrich, who has done more than 50. And while Romney has allowed himself to be questioned by the accommodating Sean Hannity, he has not agreed to cooperate with any potentially tough or uncomfortable mainstream-media stories about him. (For this story, Romney advisers Andrea Saul and Eric Fehrnstrom did not respond.)

The Romney team’s MO has been to pursue softball coverage in lieu of potentially dangerous interviews. He agreed to interviews with soft-lens magazines like Parade and People, but not with newsmagazines or websites, or even with The Boston Globe reporters who are writing a biography of the candidate. He has avoided The New York Times as well, and his only policy-oriented interview — foreign policy, exclusively — with The Washington Post was granted to blogger Jennifer Rubin, who holds similar views.